Pathways to Sustainability Based on Advanced Frugal Innovation: Innovation Generation and Innovation Scaling under Resource Constraints (AFRIN)

Summary

Advanced Frugal Innovation (AFI) are innovations that have both environmental and social benefits due to their specific design, reduced use of materials and significant price advantages over established products with similar core functions. Due to these characteristics, they can significantly contribute to accelerating the necessary transition of the economy towards sustainability. AFIs are predominantly created in areas characterized by resource scarcity and, as an efficient, cost-effective and sustainable solution, remain predominantly limited to their local domestic market. It remains unclear under which specific conditions the emergence of AFIs and their subsequent scaling is conducive to cross-regional diffusion.

The research project “Pathways to Sustainability Based on Advanced Frugal Innovation: Innovation Generation and Innovation Scaling under Resource Constraints” (acronym: AFRIN) aims to investigate the extent to which local context-bound knowledge from regions with limited resources influences the emergence of AFI and which factors enable the scaling and associated transregional diffusion of AFI. The research will focus on the Tamil Nadu region in India and the Western Cape in South Africa as case study regions where an above-average number of AFIs are generated.
 

Background

AFIs are innovations that are based on a frugal product design - i.e. a cost-saving design that is reduced to focus on core functions and generally tends to promote efforts towards a circular economy - that achieve the highest possible savings in materials and energy in the product itself and throughout the entire production process and product life cycle, taking into account the very highest technical standards. By minimizing the use of resources, AFIs have a smaller ecological footprint than conventional products and are also more affordable in terms of purchase, use and disposal. They therefore combine the characteristics of both eco/environmental innovations and social/inclusive innovations. In view of limited global resources, expected population growth and rising consumer demands, particularly in the emerging markets, AFIs offer the potential to enable paths to sustainability in a wide range of industries by means of their described properties. In theory, this could be achieved if AFIs can be produced on a large scale based on their described context of origin and thus replace conventional, more price-intensive, environmentally harmful and overdesigned products in both developing and established markets.

The generation of AFIs is tied to specific spatial conditions. On the one hand, AFIs require technical expertise, which in less prosperous countries is concentrated in few efficient companies, research and teaching institutions and therefore concentrated geographically; on the other hand, the development of AFIs requires knowledge about the needs of consumers with low purchasing power as well as knowledge about suitable product simplification mechanisms. As resource scarcity can be categorized as a major factor that influences the generation of AFI from various contexts (including institutional, historical, political and economic structures), the resulting competencies are also highly place-specific. Although AFIs offer solutions to local problems relating to the use of materials and the affordability of products and are thus locally successful, they rarely succeed in establishing themselves on a cross-regional level. The causes of this phenomenon have not been sufficiently researched and are therefore not empirically proven.
 

Aim of the Project

AFRIN aims to make a theoretically grounded empirical contribution to understanding the conditions for success in the emergence and scaling of AFI from a spatial perspective. To achieve this, the project pursues two central objectives:

1. Understand how and to what extent local contextual knowledge resulting from resource scarcity contributes to the emergence of AFI. Of particular interest is the extent to which AFIs are shaped by regional context-bound knowledge resources, which actors contribute that knowledge to the emergence of AFIs and to what extent, how local demand conditions and problems affect the emergence of AFIs and, finally, what influence local institutions have in this process.
2. Examine the factors that enable the scaling of AFI and thus represent the diffusion-relevant application context. This is of high relevance because scaling is a crucial success parameter for whether an AFI prevails beyond the local niche or remains confined to the local context. The project will therefore capture which actors contribute their knowledge resources to reduce the local context-bound nature of AFI and make appropriate adjustments to promote their application. It will also investigate which actors are involved in the expansion of production and distribution, what a regional market for an AFI looks like in detail and how institutional mechanisms such as standardization, testing and certification influence scaling.
    

Research Program

The conditions for the emergence and application of AFI are researched on the basis of the innovations themselves (object approach). Three methodological modules are used to develop a comparative perspective:

1. a compilation and analysis of secondary data,
2. a partially standardized survey to record the context of origin and application, and
3. several in-depth interviews.

The evaluation of the collected data rounds off the research program (see figure). In order to be able to separate general factors influencing the emergence and scaling of AFI from region-specific and actor-specific parameters, study regions in two countries are compared. First of all, India is ideally suited for this purpose because the concept of frugal innovation and central considerations on AFI were conceived and developed there. South Africa serves as a non-Asian research counterpart, where many years of experience with the promotion and generation of inclusive innovations exist and where the concept of AFI is increasingly gaining acceptance.

In India, the state of Tamil Nadu is considered the primary region of investigation due to its status as one of India's innovation and industrial centers. The survey and evaluation is supported to a large extent by the working group of our cooperation partner Prof. Dr. Balkrishna C. Rao from the Department of Engineering Design of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM, Chennai, Tamil Nadu). Mumbai/Maharashtra is being considered as a secondary study region.

In South Africa, the primary study region is the Western Cape, which is similar to Tamil Nadu in terms of purchasing power and innovation orientation and also has various historical, ethnic, economic and socio-structural similarities. In this region, the survey and evaluation is largely supported by the working group of our cooperation partner Prof. Dr. Sara Grobbelaar from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University (SU, Stellenbosch, Western Cape). The secondary study region is the Pretoria/Gauteng area.
 

Cooperation

The research project is a cooperation between the Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography (IWKG) of Leibniz Universität Hannover and the Department of Engineering Design of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM, India) and the Department of Industrial Engineering of Stellenbosch University (SU, South Africa) and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Secondary partner institutions are the Tata Centre of Technology and Design of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai (IITB, India) and the University of Pretoria (UP, South Africa). Together with the research partners, data will be analyzed, questionnaires developed, interviews designed and conducted on site. In the course of the project, two workshops will be held in Hanover, in which the methodological approach for the planned survey phases and later the results obtained and their suitable evaluation methods will be discussed. Both IITM and SU will also send doctoral students from their institutes to the IWKG for a selected period of time to work on the joint research project and intensify the mutual exchange.